Joe Moore <joemoore@iegrec.org>:
> > Would the resulting list of words be a "new" creation, unencumbered by
> > any license attached to the spell-checker ? ;-)
>
> No, this would be a derivative work of the Usenet postings, which are
> copyright their authors.
>
> You'd have to get permission from all Usenet posters.
I don't think it would be a derivative work, any more than a set of
simple statistics calculated from Usenet would be a derivative work.
If I counted the number of times the word "the" appeared in Usenet in
October and then published that number modulo 2, would I be infringing
on the copyrights of all posters? Perhaps I would be, as the result
depends very much on the content of every message ...
If you're seriously interested in questions like this, here's an
example you might want to look into: The models used by speech
recognition software are derived automatically from large collections
of annotated recorded speech. Those collections are very expensive to
create and not usually free. The question of whether the models
created from them are in copyright terms derived works of the speech
corpora must surely have been asked and answered. You might even find
the answer on-line somewhere. It won't necessarily tell you the answer
to the Usenet spelling dictionary question, but it might help.
Edmund